"Trading is statistics and time series analysis." This blog details my progress in developing a systematic trading system for use on the futures and forex markets, with discussion of the various indicators and other inputs used in the creation of the system. Also discussed are some of the issues/problems encountered during this development process. Within the blog posts there are links to other web pages that are/have been useful to me.

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Sunday, 24 November 2013

Suspending Work on Brownian Bands

Recently I have been doing a lot of work looking at various uses of the Brownian bands but I have been unable to come up with anything unique that I feel can help me so for now I am going to discontinue this work. There may be a time in the future when I return to this, but for now the Brownian bands are going to be put on the shelf along with my other indicators.

I have also started to become disillusioned with my attempts at creating a market classifier neural net; I think it may very well be too large a project to complete satisfactorily, so I am going to try something simpler in concept at least. In large part this change of heart is due to some recent reading I have been doing, particularly this article in which I was struck by the phrase

"As an aside, the
ideal "trades" formed by the turning points might make a good training set of
trades for a neural network-based system. Rather than scanning a chart manually
to come up with trades to feed into the neural network, the method described
here could be used to automatically find the training set."

Also over on the Mechanical Forex site there is a whole series of articles on neural nets which I have found useful and have given me a new insight. I am now going to ask readers to suspend their disbelief for a few moments while I explain.Imagine it is a few minutes before the trading open and you have to decide whether to enter long, short or remain out of the market when the market opens. However, unlike any other market participant, the Gods have given you a gift - the ability to see the near future - which means you know the OHLC for today, tomorrow and the next trading day. But, as with all gifts from the Gods, there is a catch - you can only enter and exit trades at the market open; there is no buying the low and selling the high of a candlestick bar or intraday trading permitted by the Gods. What would such a blessed but responsible trader do? How would they make their trade decision? Being responsible s/he might consider the reward to risk ratio and only take a trade if this ratio is greater than one: on the long side the maximum open of tomorrow or the day after minus today's open divided by today's open minus the minimum low of today, tomorrow or the day after: and a similar reasoning for the short side. If neither of these ratios is greater than one, no new trade will be entered today.The upper pane in the video below shows the coding of such logic. The decision to go long is rendered in blue, short in red and neutral in green. The colour of the bar indicates the action to be taken at the open of the next bar. However, it might be that when a neutral signal is given there is already be a position held, in which case the existing position is held for the duration of the neutral signal. This is effectively an always in the market, stop and reverse signal, and this is shown in the lower pane of the video. To make things slightly easier to see the entry/exit action occurs at the open of a new colour bar, i.e. if the bars change from blue to red the long is exited and the short initiated at the open of the first red bar.

Even with a cursory viewing it can be seen what a great "system" this would be, and using neural nets to create such a "system" is now my ambition.

The plan is simple: roll a moving window along the price series and use the known relationships between bars and indicators within this window to train a locally optimised neural net. The purpose of the training will be to classify the bars as long entry, short entry or neutral as in the chart in the upper pane of the above video. At the hard right edge of the chart the last three bars will be unavailable to the neural net for training purposes, but the hope is that the neural net, sufficiently well trained on all data in the window immediately prior to these three bars, will have predictive ability for them. After all, in the main, market dynamics slowly evolve over a few bars rather than dramatically leap.

Before I embark on this new work there are a few optimisation tests I would like to conduct, and these tests will form the subject matter of my next few posts.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Don't give up on the brownian motion bands! I have done something similar (slightly different calculation of the bands) after seeing your post and have had pretty good results so far, it looks like it could be a great add on to an existing system

It's a pity you gave up so fast on Brownian motion bands because they work well and I have been using them for years. As far as Mechanical forex I think his latest post indicates he is giving up because he has just discovered backtesting does not guarantee future profitability.:)

I should add that instead of using the mean of the past x periods I use the moving standard deviation, also I just use price not log returns( I know many say to use log returns for everything but in practice this is debated; all depends on what you are trying to accomplish.) I wish I could bounce some ideas back and forth with you